Making the Nation Habitable*

Abstract

The context clearly has been the movement for the destruction of the Babari mosque at the north Indian town of Ayodhya. The steady rise in majoritarian politics since the midl980s has gone hand in and hand with the fabrication of an insistent majoritarian history. Over the two decades these desires have moved from the margins of popular discourse to the center of political deliberations. The descriptive phrase ‘India has a majority of Hindus’ has now been fashioned into the battering ram of Hindu nationalism an aggressive ideological tool aimed at redrawing the basic contours of an avowedly secular nation-state. Its logic is to enforce the majoritarian idea of the singularity of national history, such that the enactment of historical vendetta against ‘Muslim conquest and rule’ of pre-colonial India becomes simultaneously the condition for the realization of